Ohio Politics Polls Post SB-16 Strippers

Can’t Touch Strippers with a 10 Foot Poll

The saga of the great Stripper debate continues. The bill is currently under review by the house due to several questions of constitutional legality and whether or not the language of the document actually makes sense or is just plain ridiculous. There is also question about the CCV and whether or not they told the truth about similar legislation in other states and legality of the bill. Recently on their site to bolster their failing support they published a poll that they had done saying how the majority of Ohioans support the bill. Of course if you look closer you will notice several fishy things about this poll, and realize that it is just another attempt by the CCV to propagate their own cause that the majority of the public does not support.

Firstly there is the whole issue of the inaccuracy of polls. Looking at the entry on Wikipedia there is an entire section on how and why they are inaccurate. First is the sampling error. This has to do with the size of sample being polled. The larger the sample, the more accurate the polls and the lower margin of error. You will notice that this poll only has a sample of 500 and a margin of error of 4.4%. The number of registered voters in Ohio for the 2004 election was 7,979,639. Is it just me or does 500 people seem like a really small sample of the total number of voters? The CCV would have you believe that the poll represents some overwhelming majority but you can clearly see it is barely a handful of people. Also with such a small sample of people the margin of error is quite high. So even this data might not be correct. Right off the bat the poll is rife with problems bringing its accuracy into question.

Secondly look at the people polled in the survey. 80% of those surveyed where white. 65% were married. Over half of them were over the age of 45. So out of those 500 people surveyed the vast majority are older married white people. Already this is an incredible biased sample. The CCV is trying to claim that this poll represents the majority of Ohioans, but obviously it is only a small percentage and not a large cross section. If I ran a poll and just sampled my constituents Iâ€™m sure I could come up with poll results so the exact opposite of these results.

Finally take a look at the company that did these polling results, The Polling Company Inc. They are a full service market research, public affairs and political consulting firm. Look at that last line, political consulting firm. They are obviously hired for political purposes to help with political issues like trying to get a bill passed. Their whole point was to design a survey that would support CCV platform and not create a non biased one that would actually show what people are thinking. Look at their list of other political clients: Massachusetts Republican Party, Mercer County Republican Committee (NJ), National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, Republican National Committee, Republicans for Environmental Protection. All of these are Republican organizations not one democratic. It looks like the CCV hired another right wing shill group to promote their conservative agenda.

What it really boils down to is we already have a method to decide what the public wants besides polling, itâ€™s called voting. Put the issue to a vote and see what the people really want. Donâ€™t interview 500 people and say this is what everybody wants. The CCV of course doesnâ€™t want to do this because the majority of people do not support the bill and further more they would be disgusted that time and money has been spent on this when so many other issues like education and the economy need to be addressed by the government.